My quick take on the vice-presidential debate last night between Peter Thiel’s gimp and Governor Care Bear is that it doesn’t matter who “won.” If you give a shit about reality, Walz won. If you prefer your political leaders to be smooth-talking sociopaths spewing bullshit, Vance won. Otherwise, beyond a surprise line or two (like Walz saying that his son witnessed a shooting), it was a disappointingly normal debate where the Democrat was overly deferential and polite and the Republican was a merry liar.
But three things stand out for me.
First, to that liar point, the most important moment in the evening was when the moderators corrected Senator JD Vance. Talking his usual fuckery about immigration, Vance said, “In Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.” After Walz spoke, quoting the Bible, moderator Margaret Brennan added, “And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. Temporary protected status.” And that’s absolutely, completely true. Vance tried to lump legal immigrants in with undocumented ones.
